California Congressman Tom McClintock gives the answer in an illuminating op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Turns out our forests have become dangerously overcrowded ever since Congress passed costly environmental regulations in the 1970s.
As a result 80% less timber is harvested from federal lands and fire now destroys a proportionally increased amount of acres. For a good chunk of the 20th century foresters paid for the ability to harvest excess timer, the forests thrived, and revenues supported forest management.
Now land management is an expensive government cost and our beautiful forests have become a deadly firetrap.
A half-century of environmental regulation hasn’t...

Minnesota's Individual Income Tax revenues started rising in 2011, two years before the state's hike in the top rate of income tax. If Illinois' policymakers are considering similar tax hikes to close their own deficits, they ought to think again. ...

A lot of people I talk to about renewable energy in Minnesota think of Germany as a great example what we should be doing here.
Green groups in the U.S. constantly characterize Germany's aggressive attempts to increase the amount of electricity generated by wind and solar as a smashing success, but unfortunately, these accounts fail to tell the whole story.
In reality, Germany's "energy transition" has stalled, according to YaleEnvironment360.
"Today, the Energiewende finds itself stalled and floundering. Germany’s carbon emissions have stagnated at roughly their 2009 level. The country remains Europe’s largest producer and burner of coal, which generates more than one-third of Germany’s power supply....

New data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis breaks county GDP down into the share derived from Private goods-producing industries, Private services-providing industries, and Government and government enterprises. Which of Minnesota's counties lead and lag in these categories?...

This article was written by Judith Curry, a climate scientist who was formerly a Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
New report on Sea Level Rise and Climate Change challenges the alarming predictions of 21st century sea level rise.
“Antarctica meltdown could double sea level rise”. “The planet could become ungovernable”. Such headlines reflect the growing alarm over sea level rise.
How worried should energy companies be about sea level rise? There are 287 energy facilities in the U.S. at coastal locations that are within 4 feet of typical high-tide level. More than half of these facilities are...

Today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its prototype estimated for Gross Domestic Product by County for the years 2012 to 2015. True, they are only prototypes and cover a limited and fairly historic set of years. But they represent the first attempt to quantify this economic variable - GDP - at the county level, which is important for state economic analysis. ...

The following article originally appeared in Reason.
Humanity is enjoying a world of increasingly cheap and ever more abundant mineral, agricultural, forestry and energy resources reports a brilliant new study, the Simon Abundance Index. This analysis by Marian Tupy,* editor of Human Progress at the Cato Institute, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University – Hawaii uses data on 50 different commodities to track their price trajectories over the past 37 years from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. They find in real price terms their basket of commodities decreased by an average of 36.3 percent between 1980 and 2017.
That's great, but their...

Congressman-elect Pete Stauber has a few more weeks before going to DC as Minnesota's new Eighth Congressional District representative. But the Republican isn't wasting any time getting behind bipartisan legislation introduced by his Democratic predecessor Cong. Rick Nolan to make way for more mining in northern Minnesota. The sooner, the better, preferably before Stauber's swearing in, according to the Duluth News Tribune.
“We both strongly agree on the importance of environmentally safe mining in northern Minnesota,” Stauber said in his news release statement. “If this legislation doesn’t become law, one of my first acts in the 116th Congress will be to...

Lee Schafer of the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote an article in the Sunday, December 9th edition of the newspaper stating that Xcel's pledge to generate 100 percent of its electricity from "carbon free" sources by 2050 made good business sense.
Unfortunately, Xcel Energy's plan will only make "business sense" for Xcel, companies like Mortenson Construction that are financially invested in the renewable energy industry, Xcel's shareholders, and non-government organizations like Fresh Energy that promote renewable energy sources like wind and solar despite their high cost and low reliability. ...